Transcom Italia has been assigned the 2016 best Customer Relationship Management award by a panel of experts from the CMMC Club, the association for companies and service providers working in the client relations supply chain. For CMMC, the award is a way to promote businesses that stand out, in a particularly complicated period for the sector, for the excellence of the initiatives put in place to improve their organization, in terms of both financial results and the internal climate among associates, by developing partnership relationships and innovating customer relationship processes.

The reasons for the award

In 2016, Transcomidentified several areas for optimization in the customer assistance processes of leading online travel operator Lastminute.com, for which it has been managing customer care activities since 2015, in a dozen or so languages. In partnership with Datachronic, a company that specializes in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions to improve the efficiency of corporate procedures, Transcom has introduced several process automation measures for Lastminute.com services. A new web platform has been developed to automatically dispatch back office activities to the first agent available on the basis of the Client’s real priorities. The dispatching platform includes an integrated, user friendly web interface that provides real time checking of all the fields entered manually by the operator. In practice, it acts as an “Automatic Checker” for booking data, guaranteeing that the Lastminute.com system is aligned with airline websites, for example, across all stages in the booking process. If any discrepancies are detected, the system suggests corrections.

Last September, Lastminute.com also decided to introduce the “Transcom Quality Centre”, a system that collects and classifies all quality monitoring results to analyze the points of strength and areas for improvement of each project, team or individual operator. This proprietary Transcom solution provides a quick way to introduce continuous improvement measures, which are essential in such a dynamic and constantly evolving sector.

“We are extremely proud of this award and I would like to thank my team, our client Lastminute.com and Datachronic for their contributions to obtaining this acknowledgement,” said Transcom General Manager for Central and Southern Europe Gianluca Gemma. “At a time when there is much talk about technological innovation, virtualization and robotics applied to customer relations, we are convinced that operating efficiency can also be achieved through process innovation, by studying solutions to make the human relationship with end users more effective and improve the quality of our agents’ work.”

On the left, TRANSCOM represented by Global Account Manager Debora Mendola and General Manager, Central and Southern Europe Gianluca Gemma; on the right, lastminute.com group Operations Director Giorgio Bonafini

The most colorful event just made it to Transcom Philippines – Transcom Color Run for Fun 2016. A three-part race that happened last May started in Bacolod on May 14, followed by Iloilo the next weekend – May 24; finally getting to Metro Manila last May 29. More than 4,000 employees of Transcom coming from its 5 sites (Bacolod, Iloilo, Mandaluyong (EDSA), Pasig and ROHQ) participated in this grand event.

In initiating this run, Transcom aimed to engage employees and unite them in pursuit of a singular goal– in this case, being healthy. Transcom promotes healthy living and wellness among its employees, and this run was a great start for this campaign. Since Transcom puts much value in family, friends and family members of employees were welcomed to the event

Each participant was given a kit which included a race shirt, a race bib, sunshades, a sweat band, a string bag, a water jug, temporary tattoos, and of course the colored powders!

Before the gun start, our dear sponsors and partners prepared tons of freebies as giveaways for the participants. Security Bank gave away free ice cream in scoops, an energy drink company gave-away free samples to help the runners stay refreshed. There were lots of biscuits, sweets and even some lozenges. Right before the run, Zumba sessions helped the participants warm up and stretch.

Splashes of colors were everywhere – on the streets and on the runners. Getting all colored too were the members of the Philippine Volcanoes who joined the Manila Leg. Happy, sweaty and colored runners came back in less than an hour and enjoyed food and refreshments plus music from the invited DJ’s.

The race was categorized into a 3K and a 5K run. Winners of each leg received cash prizes worth:

3K run

1st Finisher – PHP 5,000H

2nd Finisher – PHP 2,500

3rd Finisher – PHP 1,500

5K run

1st Finisher – PHP 10,000

2nd Finisher – PHP 7,000

3rd Finisher – PHP 5,000

The prizes were not limited to the race winners. Transcom also hosted raffle draws wherein all participants had a chance to win gift certificates, hotel accommodations and gadgets!

Employees really enjoyed the run and had so much fun. Happy smiles filled the venue and posts they uploaded on Social Media showed their unique perspective on the event.

In recent years, continuous transformation, evolving technology and huge social media growth have exponentially increased customers’ influence over your brand and radically modified the way that companies do business.

Recently, “Customer Experience” has been defined as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company as a whole” (cit. Manning and Bodyne). This means that the customer experience is determined by each of the touch-points through which the customer interacts with the company.

Interactions with the products and services on offer aren’t the only factors contributing to the customer experience, which also include contact with the website, the contact center operator, brand image and advertising, social media conversations, information brochures, etc.

Customers judge their experience by assessing their interactions with the company based on three parameters:

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Meets needs;

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Easy, i.e. how easy it is to buy a product, use a service and obtain technical and commercial assistance;

•

Enjoyable or engaging, i.e. the emotional and rational response to the customer experience.

Transcom has launched a series of projects to strengthen the Customer Experience across the entire customer journey, with a special focus on all touch-points and in particular on Multimodality and Analytics.

In addition, using advanced data analytics tools, Transcom has launched a project to analyze the interactions between the company and its customers in a detailed and structured way, including their behavior and preferences, in order to improve the quality of the serviceprovided and how it’s perceived by the customer.

Here are some examples of the analytics projects under development to support our Clients:

These are just some of the pilot projects developed at our LeonarDo research center in L’Aquila, where a team of experts began to work a few months ago by fully exploiting the huge potential offered by new technology.

Our client, a lifestyle fashion company that offers an engaging and personalized shopping experience to over 35 million members worldwide through its portfolio of brands, was looking for a new partnership for enabling a multi-lingual customer service in a fast growing environment. In 2014, Transcom was selected as the new strategic partner to support the client’s European multi-channel and multi-lingual inbound customer service operations.

All our client’s customers become part of a membership program and member service is setup as an integral and essential part of their business strategy to provide a seamless member experience, which ultimately leads to business growth. Professional management of order inquiries, returns & exchanges, billing inquiries and retention activities are the key objectives in this strategic partnership. After an initial 6-months pilot phase, we have now agreed and signed a two year contract.

Transcom operates worldwide through 54 contact center across 23 countries, delivering services in 33 languages to over 400 international brands in various industry verticals.

A stable customer satisfaction level in the transition phase and clear improvements of customer experience (proven by KPI development) after full transition have shown that Transcom’s proposed solution meets exactly the clients requirements. Now the customer service organization is perfectly prepared for further growth scenarios for different languages and European markets.

In March, Transcom Italy presented its new Research and Innovation Center for Customer Experience to the press and the local authorities. The center is located in L’Aquila and set up jointly as a partnership with L’Aquila University and local contact center company Elleacall.

The LeonarDo 2.0.14 research project, which has been endorsed by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, will span over three years, with the aim of developing - by October 2017 newprocessandnewtechnologicalsolutionsthatimprovetheservicesdeliveredbycontactcenterstoconsumers andcitizens, based on their Customer Experience.

“Innovation and the constant quest for excellence are two of Transcom’s fundamental business valuesand we invest in resources and skills to promote them” commented Roberto Boggio, Transcom Regional General Manager for Central and South Europe, during the inauguration.

“The strategic agenda of L’Aquila University considers the institution to be an open social laboratory and, therefore, applied research projects conducted jointly with the business system form a fundamental part of our planning,” said Professor Paola Inverardi, Dean of L’Aquila University.“One of our objectives is to strengthen this network of collaborations, and the partnership with Transcom in the framework of the LeonarDo 2.0.14 project is perfectly aligned with this strategic vision: we are convinced that it will produce benefits in terms of technological capabilities at the service of local development.”

The center has been operational for a few months now and already employs 10 researchers; over the coming three years we aim to involve about 40 customer experience professionals in the project.

Technological changes impose new interrelation processes between companies and clients. Network connections and the ever more widespread use of mobile communication devices (smartphones, tablets, notebooks, etc.) are radically changing not only how we acquire information, but also the interaction between people, between customers and businesses, and between the public and the institutions. From this perspective, the work of the Transcom’s research center in L’Aquila will focus on identifying new social and digital methodologies, using technology-based tools and innovative processes.

This VIDEO, (in Italian) by a local TV network, provides a summary of the event’s key messages.

Our Leeds site has enjoyed a successful partnership directly with the primary loan provider for further education in the UK for five years. During 2014 the UK Government created a new outsourcing model (Debt Market Integrator) that controls the placement of Government owned debts. A leading UK panel management company for debt solutions was awarded the contract via a protracted tender process and became the supplier of choice for the Government in terms of outsourcing functions and control for the DMI.

The subsequent tender process for inclusion on the panel for outsourcing opportunities allowed Transcom UK to reveal our already successful, tried, tested and proven strategies and to agree commercials that would allow for the relationship to continue. In December 2014, it was announced that Transcom had been retained as a partner for the client.

Innovation was a key factor in our success; dialogue between the client and the broker had clearly referenced Transcom’s flexibility and adaptability to provide a service which demonstrated recognition of the client’s needs and our unsurpassed product knowledge. The innovation reflected actions taken in July of last year as we recognized the need for ‘out of the box’ thinking to increase revenue streams for the client and for our business.

The customer base of this client comprises a blend of students who attended University in the UK but are registered as living overseas, as well as those who are registered as living in the UK. A large proportion of the work we undertake is located in Australia, New Zealand and the West Coast of America where extreme time zone differences exist. We initially created a trial of 6am opening to capitalize on the Australian customers which has resulted in uplifting average cash collections for the client. The trial was then extended to include opening hours to 3am to capitalize on the West Coast of America which has continued to strengthen our collections and the client relationship. In October we were awarded 100% allocation based on our success.

Let’s extend our congratulations and thanks to the dedicated team who embraced the changes and delivered some truly amazing results.